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Starbucks continues to add to their already impressive (at least by coffee industry standards) benefits package. Along with things like an expansive transgender health care policy, 100% tuition coverage for first-time bachelors via Arizona State’s online program, and paid parental leave, Starbucks has announced the newest addition to their package: a subsidized backup care plan for children and seniors.

Called Care@Work, Starbucks has teamed up with Care.com to provide all employees at “US company-owned stores” with “an online service connecting families and caregivers,” per the press release. In practical terms, this means all 180,000+ employees will receive 10 subsidized backup care days for children and adults.

Using the Care@Work portal, employees will be able to schedule last-minute care for their loved ones for the subsidized cost of “$1 an hour for in-home backup child and adult care or $5 per day for in-center child care” for the allotted 10 days. After exhausting these days, other services—like pet sitting and housekeeping—become available, though at full cost to the employees.

The move comes in response to a significant sector of the work force having difficulty balancing their job and their family. From the press release:

A recent analysis of the National Survey of Children’s Health showed that 2 million working parents had to quit their jobs in 2016, the year of the survey, because of child care issues. The crunch isn’t just being felt by parents, but also for those who are caring for their own aging relatives. One in five U.S. workers report they are currently providing assistance for older relatives and friends, according to a report by the AARP Public Policy Institute. Nearly 70 percent of those who do say they had to take time off or make other work adjustments because of caregiving.

Also included in the Care@Work package are resources to help Starbucks employees with senior care planning. This give participants access to “a Senior Care Advisor for professional guidance and a customized plan for senior care to help understand long term caregiver options, housing alternatives, finances and legal concerns – all at no cost.”

For all the (often justified) grumbling people to about Starbucks—at this very moment, someone is angrily typing, “BUT WHAT ABOUT [WHATEVER THEIR BEEF IS], SPRUDGE…”—the company continues to lead the charge in creating a robust employee benefits package. For more information, read the full Care@Work press release here.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

All media via Starbucks

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Source: Coffee News

Can you believe it? It’s nearly time for the 2018 New York Coffee Festival, presented by Allegra Events. Now back for its astounding fourth year in Manhattan, the festival brings together a who’s who of New York City coffee culture, plus leading brands from around the world, in a three day exhibition dedicated to the bean and nothing but. (Okay, there’s some food and tea too, but it is mostly all coffee.)

We’ll be there as part of a long-running partnership with the festival, so be sure to catch Sprudge on the Coffee Masters Stage and presenting at The Lab—more details below. And now, in what’s become something of a tradition here at Sprudge, check out an advance look at some of the most exciting facets of this year’s fest. Note that no such highlight reel could ever be complete, and that much more information—including last minute ticket options for you stragglers out there—can be found at the official New York Coffee Festival website.

Coffee Masters

It’s back! Coffee’s most lucrative tournament has returned to the United States again, for the fourth running of the Coffee Masters Tournament at New York Coffee Festival. This year’s event is poised to turn heads yet again, featuring an all-star panel of judges, emcees, and competitors from around the world, competing on gear from Slayer, Mahlkönig, and Hario. This event takes place all three days of the festival Complete details area available here at the official Coffee Masters NYC homepage.

T. Ben Fischer at the 2017 US Barista Championship Qualifying Event in Knoxville, TN.

The Lab

An industry-leading exhibition of coffee knowledge and education, The Lab at New York Coffee Festival is back with its finest line-up ever. Featured speakers include Grace Hightower De Niro (Friday, 12:15PM), George Howell (Friday, 1:00pm), T. Ben Fischer of Glitter Cat Barista (Saturday 10:00AM), Tymika Lawrence of Genuine Origin (Saturday, 2:30PM), and many more. Check here for a complete listing of speakers, and be sure to catch Sprudge founders Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen presenting at The Lab Stage One on Saturday the 13th (3:15PM)—talking about their new book, The New Rules of Coffee, and taking your audience questions.

The Brew Bar

A new feature at this year’s fest, Brew Bar is an elite collection of roasters from around the world, exhibiting in a series of take-over sessions to show off their favorite coffees. Check out the complete schedule here and be sure not to miss highlight appearances from Truth Coffee from Cape Town, SA, Koppi of Helsingborg, Sweden, and Five Elephant Coffee from Berlin, plus domestic favorites like Equator Coffees & Teas, Nobletree, and Black & White Coffee Roasters.

La Marzocco True Artisan Cafe

Always a major stop on the NY Coffee Festival showfloor, La Marzocco’s rotating exhibition of small roasters is back again in 2018. As a set piece the True Artisan Cafe consistently makes for some of the most interesting booth design happening at this show—or at any coffee festival. You’ll see us there, running around between appointments, stopping for another espresso.

Charcuterie and Ratio Brewers at the Coutume Coffee Roasters tasting.

The Village

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, at the New York Coffee Festival, The Village is where all the little coffee children and bean teens come to see and be seen. It’s a grand display of booths, exhibitions, tastings, samples, takeovers, and so very much more. Annual stand-outs include booths by Stumptown, Oatly, Hario, and Mr. Black, and we’re looking forward to checking out this year’s offering from Trade, Oxo, Sey Coffee, and so many more.

For a complete listing of what’s on at the 2018 NY Coffee Festival, visit the official website and be sure to follow the festival on Instagram. Follow us there too while you’re at it—we’ll be covering the very best of the fest all weekend long.

The post What’s On At The 2018 New York Coffee Festival appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

The great coffee company consolidation continues. This one lacks the certain Illuminati, conspiracy theory-inducing panache of a multi-billionaire German family playing coffee Katamari, though. It is admittedly on a much smaller scale and makes a lot more sense. Able Brewing, maker of the Kone and Disk metal coffee filters, has been acquired by Mark Hellweg, founder of Clive Coffee and Ratio.

Able Brewing began by answering a simple question: with the growth in popularity of pour-over, can a reusable coffee filter meet the expectations of this new breed of persnickety hand brewers? The answer was the Kone, the world’s first precision-etched stainless steel filter for the Chemex. Able later grew to include the Disk reusable AeroPress filter as well as other manual brewing accessories.

The brand was just one of many interests for creator Keith Gehrke, who in other coffee circles, is better known for his time spent roasting at Victrola, Flying Goat, Ecco Caffe, and Coava Coffee Roasters. In 2015, Gehrke went on to found States Coffee & Mercantile in Martinez, California (profiled here on Sprudge). And it is this project that has pulled his attention away from Able, turning over the keys to Hellweg and his business partner Brad Walhood.

The announcement came via an Instagram post on Able’s account. Hellweg and Gehrke have long been co-conspirators in the coffee brewing innovation game, so much so that Able created a custom Kone filter to be used specifically with Hellweg’s Ratio Eight automatic coffeemaker.

The acquisition was made by Hellweg and Walhood, not Ratio or Clive, meaning the brand will continue to operate under the Able Brewing moniker. In an email to Sprudge, Hellweg states that folks can expect to see an expanded portfolio from Able in the future. “We are not ready to divulge details, but we are going to be looking at other areas of manual brewing of both coffee and tea to see where we can apply the Able perspective.” Hellweg adds, “Manual brewing is a crowded category with an overwhelming array of options, so we will only want to offer a product if we can do something a little different, a touch nicer in terms of the brewing experience, coffee quality, and durability.”

Hellweg tells Sprudge that an official announcement will be made available on Able’s website shortly. In the meantime, more information is available via Able’s Instagram.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top photo © Mark Poprocki/Adobe Stock

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Source: Coffee News

I remember when I visited my extended family in Taiwan in 1998. Lining the streets were vendors doling out the latest movie on DVD, before it even left the theater. A few years later, the girls around school were all sporting bags with the Chanel-style C patterned around them. I bought a pair of C-patterned heels for NT$100 (US$3 at that time). They were such a steal and people fawned all over them.

What I didn’t know was that pirated movies and counterfeit products were intellectual property rights violations, and that I was enabling the market.

When I first decided to write this feature series [READ PART ONE HERE] I had wanted to explore cultural influences in intellectual property (IP). Instead, it evolved into also looking at how developing countries manage IP and how the internet influences global coffee culture. Every country has a different approach to IP laws, and social media only makes access to other people’s ideas easier.

IP cases in coffee that play out on the international stage tend to be dominated by large corporations—that is, those entities that have the resources to take things worldwide. Patent registrations protect companies, but they also expire after a set number of years. In 1976, Nestlé filed its first patent for its single-pod Nespresso system and subsequently filed at least 1700 more patents. In the US, Keurig Green Mountain filed its first patent for K-Cup pods in 1992. For both companies, the patents began to expire in 2012, opening the doors to new companies and cheaper pods.

Most specialty coffee companies don’t seem to care much about patent wars, despite some having been recently purchased by larger entities like JAB Holding Company or Nestlé. But as specialty coffee—and its accoutrement—continues to be a growing industry, new coffee equipment is constantly being invented. Having ready access to social media only means the newest ideas can get knocked off easier than ever.

The PUSH tamper, created by UK-based Clockwork Espresso, is one example of new coffee equipment that’s been duplicated around the world. In 2015, when soon-to-be United Kingdom Barista champion Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood pulled out a strange, hockey-puck-like tamper on the world competition stage, the audience was buzzing. The shape was unlike any tamper on the market and could conceivably solve pressure consistency issues that occur from one tamp to the next. As expected, similar products began appearing on the world market soon after. When asked about them, the founder of Clockwork Espresso’s Pete Southern confirmed that they were unauthorized copies. “Yes, there are several replica products on the market that are produced without our permission,” he said via email.

Southern’s background is in biotech, where IP protections are common and respected, giving him a leg up on protecting his new product. “Working in this field means that I have direct experience of working with patents, litigation, enforcement, action, etc,” he said. “The coffee industry currently lacks this understanding of IP, but I think this will change over time.”

Southern plans on building an IP portfolio, which is a collection of IP registrations and assets that a company manages. He elaborated, “We will use this portfolio to protect our investment, in a strategic rather than reactive way.”

One common misconception he points out is that “people also don’t seem to realize that selling/distributing/marketing an infringing product without permission is just as illegal as manufacturing it.” On the flip side, patent owners are also able to license their technology, which can benefit the creation of new products without worrying about infringements.

In his paper “Intellectual Property Challenges for Developing Countries: An Economic Perspective,” Keith E. Markus, Professor of Economics at University of Colorado, Boulder, writes, “The costs of developing a system adequate for handling mere counterfeiting cases, let alone complicated patent disputes, can be substantial.” So while a developing country’s economy could be open to stronger IP laws, those laws lack teeth if no one is able to enforce them.

Furthermore, technology licenses are expensive and benefit those who hold the copyrights, mostly companies based in the US. Markus estimated a net inflow of $5.8 billion per year in licensing fees paid to US companies.

At the time of this writing, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, which is in response to “alleged policies that help its native companies acquire the technology of US firms.” Tariffs are predicted to harm relations between the two countries, beginning with China imposing its own tariffs on US goods. To expand into the Chinese market, where specialty coffee is poised to grow in both consuming and producing sectors, some sharing of technology information is needed.

Barb and Doug Garrott are co-owners of Orphan Espresso, a Troy, Idaho company that designs and sells coffee grinders and accessories. They’ve had their “products directly purchased, and copied, sold on Amazon, and on eBay,” the Garrotts told Sprudge via email. Orphan Espresso’s OE Lower Bearing Upgrade Kit (for use with the Hario Skerton grinder), Ipanema Dosing Cylinder, and standard dosing funnels are all products they’ve seen directly copied by both small and large, multinational companies.

When the company was first starting out, applying for design patents was too costly for them. Reaching out to the companies that were copying its products only produced responses that pointed out the lack of a patent. The Garrotts learned that “the more successful, the faster it will be copied and if your R&D costs, or tooling costs are quite high, you may be copied before those costs are fully recovered.”

And if companies use overseas manufacturers, IP protection is key. The biggest mistake that the Garrotts have seen peers make, though not made themselves, is “collaborative manufacturing, where the overseas partner became a seller of the design, to the detriment of the original manufacturer—it was a costly mistake.”

Through a Western lens, it is easy to criticize some of this as outright stealing. In his book, “Trouble in the Middle: American-Chinese Business Relations, Culture, Conflict, and Ethics,” author Steven P. Feldman, Professor of Business Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, puts the viewpoint into perspective. In a Confucian society, value is placed in the collective rather than in the individual.

Feldman writes, “Rather than regarding invention as a private right, the Chinese regard public duplication of creative objects as the proper approach to the value of such objects because all creativity comes from a public repository and should contribute back to it.”

This belief in collectivism vs. individualism is at direct odds with IP, where assets and ideas are registered and fought over. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 meant that it had to agree to some basic IP laws. WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) establishes “minimum standards of protection and enforcement that each government has to give to the intellectual property held by nationals of fellow WTO members.”

Feldman says that market protection and stability is far more important to the Chinese government than IP enforcement. He writes: “The Chinese government is concerned that enforcement of IP could hinder economic development by blocking access to information and technology, allowing foreign firms who own the IP to dominate the China market and creating a trade imbalance that favors the West.”

International accords were written by developed nations and have been criticized as being a barrier for developing nations’ growth. Feldman concludes, “The fact is that developing nations cannot compete with developed nations in most areas of IP.”

Technology’s Influences on Coffee Culture

In Vietnam, where Confucianism has a long history, coffee is both grown and consumed. Because the specialty coffee industry is newer, the values may not be as impactful as in other industries.

Sarah G. Grant, Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, studies Vietnam’s cultural and economic policies in relation to the commodity coffee industry. In a written interview, Grant says the internet played a greater role in the industry than Confucianism. “The Vietnamese specialty coffee industry developed quite rapidly and I think the relative age, education level, and English language fluency has significantly shaped it,” she says. At the moment, Vietnamese specialty coffee professionals are collaborative and supportive of each other.

Social media has certainly played a role in intellectual property and design concepts. Being able to see what a well-known cafe abroad looks like without ever leaving your country offers up an opportunity to spark ideas close to home. Grant says, “A lot of these models put cafe design first—some of the best-known specialty cafes in Vietnam feel like walking into a cafe in LA, Berlin, or San Francisco and I think there’s something to be said for that design influence.”

Interior design inspiration is one thing, but images, logos, and other such copyrighted or trademarked materials can be found floating across international waters. Brian W. Jones, a designer and brand consultant to coffee companies, shared a few examples of this with Sprudge via email.

“Poster designs that I’ve made have been turned into stamps that people use like a logo on their takeaway cups, paintings on their walls, [designs on] their own t-shirts,” Jones says. Most of the violators are small businesses in faraway countries, and pursuing action is often expensive.

When designing for a client, Jones retains only the right to display work in a portfolio. However, he’s observed a client’s branding pirated to a country distant from the original business. “I worked on a [cafe] branding project in London that had [the company’s] entire name and logo ripped off in Seoul,” Jones says. “There was signage and printed cups and engraved tables, all with this logo I designed for a different company.”

What is more concerning—and why many of these protections exist in the first place—is when a stolen name or trademark begins to be confused with the original holder. This tends to dilute the brand and can be damaging to the company. Jones says, “People who would travel to Seoul began to think the London-based company had expanded to South Korea.”

UK-based shop Kaffeine is no stranger to having its designs and name used outside of its home country.  Peter Dore-Smith, founder and director of Kaffeine, wrote via email that despite having the logo and name registered across the EU, “We now have ‘branches in Russia, Jakarta, Texas, Budapest, Penkridge (UK) and the latest is in Crete. There may be even one in Sydney.’”

For Dore-Smith, a friendly reach out comes first. If it fails, then the decision to pursue legal action comes down to where their marks are protected and if it’s worth the cost. “The cost of getting a solicitor to write a letter is about £300 each letter, then following up and chasing, you are looking at around £1,000,” he says.

Farah Bhatti, shareholder at business law firm Buchalter, advises her clients to protect their mark in countries where they plan on selling their products. “Because unlike the US, where it’s a first-to-use country… a lot of other countries are first-to-file countries,” she says. In cases where companies have registered her clients’ trademarks, she ends up filing oppositions against them. Obtaining the rights ends up costing $20,000 when a registration could’ve been only $3000 to $5000.

IP is immensely complicated, especially when you’re expanding internationally. Every country has its own management system, copycat products abound in every industry, and the Internet has only made it easier than ever to adopt ideas.

If success is in your plans, Dore-Smith says, then you should get protection for your brand. Design can be inspired by another shop, but not by a duplication of its marks. “Making a direct copy of something is just stupid and taking the piss,” he adds.

The coffee industry has more challenges ahead in navigating IP in international waters and it may take a few high-profile cases to spur companies into taking protective action.

The final part of this series will focus on IP as it specifically relates to the coffee plant itself in origin countries. Missed the first installment? Click here.

Jenn Chen (@TheJennChen) is a San Francisco–based coffee marketer, writer, and photographer. Read more Jenn Chen on Sprudge.

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Source: Coffee News